Paid internship with ITS to study VM

If you have any interest please contact me at gms@psu.edu.

The description follows:

There are real advantages to the virtualization of computer systems. One key advantage of virtualizing computer systems is the overall gain in effective utilization of the physical computer hardware (keeping the system resources busier over time, thus reducing periods of low or no utilization during the delivery of services.) ALSO, virtualization provides for robust systems administration capabilities that enhance systems uptime and recovery from failure. HOWEVER, there are costs to running virtualization software, i.e. the hypervisor, on the hardware. In running instances of operating systems on top of hypervisors running on the physical hardware it's been observed that the amount of performance degradation of the system varies by different hypervisors on the same hardware.

I would like to conduct a parametric study to evaluate the relative performance costs in CPU, Memory and I/O under the various hypervisors on specific hardware platforms. The parameters to be varied and their relative affects studied will include 3 or more hypervisors on 2 or more systems in hopes to understand why one hypervisor performs better relative to another one on the same hardware. Also doing so while varying the number of guest OS's on a given hardware host. Though source code will likely not be available, the hope is to deduce why there are different observed performance characteristics.

Some details:

1. The primary architecture to be studied will be INTEL in a SMP system.

2. The primary OS's studied will be Linux and MS Windows.

3. As time and resources allow, other architectures may be studied. AIX on POWER, Solaris on SPARC, and Z/OS on Z utilizing their respective system virtualization technologies are possibilities.